Spacecraft Crashes Into Satellite

Juha-Matti Laurio writes "A robotic NASA spacecraft designed to rendezvous with an orbiting satellite instead crashed into its target. Unbeknownst to engineers at the time, DART's main sensor mistakenly believed it was flying away from the satellite when it was actually moving 5 feet per second toward it, investigators found."

Comments

New Math Sucks! Let's Raise the Stakes!

[70Bang]

We've got a history established where people taught -> new math -> students who taught -> new math -> students -> ... -> current engineers and we're seeing plenty of problems with meters|feet, up|down, left|right, top|bottom (whilst we're at it, let's just interchange all of the quark properties) with some very expensive toy$. This likely includes plenty of [relatively] smaller pricetag$ (yet still bad enough - on a scale of "defense contractor bad"). Ye, NA$A still wants us to throw money at them as though it's coming off of a broken photocopier which won't stop printing. ("We promise we'll use a few more decimal points and be more careful next time!") There's no accountability until so much money has been wasted it would produce such a clog in a pipe Roto-Rooter would rather go out of business than take on. Perhaps the only space activities can be those which have a human involved, even for token purposes? That seems to be the only time space-type activities are taken seriously.

Launch an astronaut (no monkeys or dogs), watch soomething happen, splashdown. It sounds like waste, but when someone's life is at stake, it seems to force them to keep their eye on the ballgame (not just the ball). Otherwise, they try to maneuver hardware as though it's a mechanical erector set-based gaming system shown at E3 with no consequences...they can just hit the [reset] button when they smurf up (aka "give us some more money so we can practice some more"). When it's just hardware, success amounts to lots of geeks & nerds jumping up & down, toastinig with double-strength kool-aid, then taking turns to run to the bathroom to stroke off. Besides, there are lots of people looking to hit space, and there'd be no dearth of volunteers to keep NA$A honest. When there's a risk (which there wasn't in this case), they'll be careful (not more careful). Think of it as akin to packing your own parachute. If you have something at stake, really at stake, you tend to be a bit more paranoid about your work.